Patricia Craig
Life
?1942- ; b. at 551 Donegall Road, W. Belfast; educated Belfast and London; expelled from St. Dominic’s [Convent Grammar School] for allegedly ‘carrying-on’ with local boys while at the St Brigid's College in the Donegal Gaeltacht (Rannfast), in 1959; effectively banned from other schools and completed her education at Assumption College, Ballynahinch; entered Belfast College of Art, 1960; proceeded to London School of Art, 1963; taught art at Battersby [London];
 
contrib. an article to The Observer on Virginia Woolf but was not published again for 10 years; issued a book on girl's fiction with Mary Cadogan (Gollancz 1976); ed. Oxford Books of Detective Stories, Penguin Book of British Comic Stories, and anthologies of Northern Ireland writers; returned from London to Co. Antrim, 1999; issued The Ulster Anthology (2002); freelance author and critic, with an interest in girls' books, detective fiction and World War fiction; she is a biographer of Elizabeth Bowen; frequent contributor to many periodicals, including Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books; m. to a painter.

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Works
  • Elizabeth Bowen (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1986), 142pp.
  • ed., The Rattle of The North: An Anthology of Ulster Prose (Belfast: Blackstaff 1992), 456pp.;
  • ed. The Oxford Book of Ireland (Oxford/NY: OUP 1998; rep. 1999), 514pp.;
  • ed. and intro., 12 Irish Ghost Stories (Oxford: OUP 1998), 145pp.
  • Intro. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (London: Vintage 1998), 318pp.;
  • ed., The Belfast Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff 1999), 459pp.; Asking for Trouble (Belfast: Blackstaff 2007) [memoir].
 

See also ‘History and its Retrieval in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry: Paulin, Montague and Others’, in Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays (Macmillan 1996), pp.107-23; obituary of Sir Charles [C. E. B.] Brett [q.v.]; review of Hugo Hamilton, The Sailor in the Wardrobe, in Times Literary Supplement (10 Feb. 2006) [under Hamilton, q.v.], ... &c.

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Reviews in the New York Review of Books, 1981-82:
  • 13 May 1982: ‘Playing to Empty Pockets’, review of An Duanaire: An Irish Anthology 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed presented by Seán Ó Tuama, with verse translations by Thomas Kinsella;
  • 8 Oct. 1981: ‘Innocents’, review of The Temptation of Eileen Hughes by Brian Moore and A Gift Horse and Other Stories by Kate Cruise O'Brien
  • 14 May 1981: ‘The Power of the Unstated’, review of The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen
  • 19 March 1981: ‘Thin Ice’, review of Other People's Worlds by William Trevor, and The State of Ireland: Seventeen Stories and a Novella by Benedict Kiely.
  • [...]
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Criticism
Fred Johnston, ‘Guid as Gold’, review of The Belfast Anthology, in Books Ireland (March 2000), pp.61-62; [Shirley Kelly, interview], ‘Did It Have to happen to Me?’, in Books Ireland (Oct. 2007), pp.209-10; Malachi O’Doherty, ‘[...] A pained and poignant remembrance of illicit teenage fumblings’, review of Asking for Trouble, in The Independent [UK] (8 Jan. 2008) [online]; Rory Brennan, review of Asking for Trouble: The Story of An Escapade, in Books Ireland (Feb. 2008), p.9.

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